


geography is gonna make a mess of me

by slybrunette



Category: Chuck (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-24
Updated: 2010-07-24
Packaged: 2017-10-15 06:00:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,303
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/157738
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slybrunette/pseuds/slybrunette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>you can take the girl out of the cia but you can't take the -- well, you know how this goes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	geography is gonna make a mess of me

She shows up at the local bar one night and there are days where it feels like she just never left after that.

One would think that an unfamiliar face in a town that proudly proclaims its population to be just over six hundred fifteen would raise some red flags.

It doesn’t.

The people are friendly. They smile at her and a man who she won’t be sleeping with buys her a drink and shakes her hand when he introduces himself. She smiles back and makes small talk and tries not to wonder if the bartender is listening in, if anyone here knows who she is or was or might still be.

You can take the girl out of the CIA but it doesn’t work in reverse.

Everything raises red flags to her.

 

 

-

 

 

Truth is, she isn’t sure how she ended up somewhere in Oregon, eighty three miles outside of the nearest major city.

There’s no story about picking a spot on the map and pointing her car towards it, about flipping a coin or driving for days on end until it just felt right.

She was either going to run as far from D.C. as possible or as far from Burbank. Opposite coasts. Meeting in the middle felt nothing if not unsatisfactory.

Sarah chose D.C., and then she drove up the West Coast and only stopped because the brakes would go all the way down to the floor every fifth stop sign or red light. It took a week and several hundred dollars to fix and she lost the energy to keep moving along with her money, in the quiet space of her hotel room.

 

 

-

 

 

It’s a tourist town in the summer.

She drives up in the winter and doesn’t find this out until early June when a man gives her a dirty look behind a newspaper, faintly raised scar along his right forearm; she dyes her hair auburn in the tiny bathroom in her apartment and sleeps with a gun underneath her pillow, another in the nightstand.

 

 

-

 

 

Casey was probably a long time coming; high stress situations, as they say.

If she scrolls down too far in her phone, if she isn’t careful, she can still find him tied to a bed post in some hotel room, boxers and gag in his mouth, and a smile still pulls at her lips before her hand starts to shake.

 

 

-

 

 

She fucks him, showers at her apartment, and when she sneaks into Chuck’s bed she’s too quiet.

It startles him, her lips on his and the body next to him that wasn’t there when he fell asleep.

“What?” He’s bleary-eyed but a smile spreads, soft and slow like the crawl of fingers on her skin. “What was that for?”

For what she just did.

She presses her lips to his once more, close-mouthed and dry, the kind of kiss that doesn’t mean to start something, and says, “Just go back to sleep.”

He doesn’t.

He doesn’t and her thighs ache from the effort she put forth just a few short hours ago but she’s dealt with much worse. He comes with a breathy whisper of her name released into the still air of his room and she doesn’t come at all.

Sarah counts the minutes on his clock, waits for twenty to pass, and makes her way to the bathroom, hair a tangled mess and a mark on collarbone that’s developed too soon for it to be his work.

Her training fails or his succeeds because when she walks back in he’s awake again.

Or maybe he always was.

Up on his elbows with the sheets at his waist, he asks, “Everything okay?”

“Yeah. Of course.”

There’s really nothing else for her to say.

This job doesn’t afford her an alternative and proximity has caused the same to be true for this relationship.

 

 

-

 

 

The people in this town were born in this town and they will probably die in this town.

More than that, they would be happy to.

This isn’t the sort of place people try to escape from, save for those that aspire to gain some sort of fame, in whatever form that comes. Politics in the cities, in D.C., and movie stars in Los Angeles and New York.

She has lived far too close to the world of the former, has no desire for the latter.

Her entire life has been about _not_ making a name for herself.

She’s still not content to die here. But then she isn’t content to die anywhere, even if she doesn’t fear it.

 

 

-

 

 

At the heart of the problem is the fact that Casey is just far too much like her.

“I don’t know why you bother pretending to be so cold with him.”

“Someone has to balance you out.”

There is a loaded gun in her hands and him in an armchair, testing her patience.

That takes balls.

Not that there was any doubt.

“I don’t think that was in your job description.”

“And I don’t think sleeping with Bartowski was in yours.”

If there is a hint of jealousy in his tone, they both choose to ignore it.

She sets the gun on the table, to remove even fleeting temptation. Walking out his front door is the better option.

“Neither was sleeping with you.”

“If you’re going to break one of the rules then you might as well go all out.”

 

 

-

 

 

She gets lonely, sometimes, so far removed from what she knows.

The desire isn’t stronger than her desire to avoid a repeat of previous history.

A man behind a newspaper narrows his eyes that summer and she keeps her body angled away from the man at the bar who buys her a drink.

 

 

-

 

 

Eventually, he becomes the man who serves them to her, on some nights. His father dies and the lumber mill doesn’t have as much use for him as it once did.

“I never asked you what you do.”

She curves a hand along against the cold glass; doesn’t drink. “I’m in between jobs.”

“Okay. So what did you do?”

“Well, the last job I worked was at the Orange Orange in Burbank.”

“Isn’t that a bit, I don’t know, redundant?”

Maybe she laughs. Maybe she even means it. “Yeah, there was a definitely a lack of creativity on their part.”

“I would say so.”

It’s the only true thing that she will ever tell him.

 

 

-

 

She kisses him in the winter, the beginning of her second year there.

It doesn’t snow here, even in the coldest months, but it rains with a certain degree of regularity, and it’s pouring down on her windshield for the first hour as she drives.

Halfway to Burbank she pulls off of the road, into an empty drugstore parking lot in the pre-dawn hours, and breathes.

She’s running out of places to flee to.

 

 

-

 

 

Life in Burbank ends via a four am phone call.

“Agent Walker, we’re going to need you on a plane immediately.”

The bed in her apartment has been seeing more of her than Chuck’s, since Casey decided to complicate things. Professional distance, she maintains, and Chuck believes her because he has no other choice but to.

There is chatter on the other end of the line, background and urgent.

“Why? What’s going on?”

“They’re all dead.”

 

 

-

 

 

She turns the car around, albeit in a slightly different direction. Northeast.

At a pay phone in Idaho, she calls the bar.

He picks up; she’d anticipated that.

“There was some guy in here looking for you.”

“Yeah?”

“Tall, kind of…built like a tree trunk.”

The analogy doesn’t make her smile.

It does make her check the glove compartment for her gun, feels the knife strapped to her ankle, concealed by her boot.

And then she runs towards danger.

 

 

-

 

 _fin._


End file.
